Credit given to Bush misplaced

Dr. Wayne Bowen may be a historian, but his comments concerning Afghanistan are those of a partisan politician. Bowen forgets Bush made a tactical error in starting a virtual all-out war against the Afghan people that led not to the capture of bin Laden but rather to the devastation of Afghanistan, the deaths of soldiers and the tragic killing of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians. And that Bush then left the mess he'd made in Afghanistan to manufacture false claims about Hussein and his supposed "weapons of mass destruction." The result of this debacle was the destruction of the infrastructure of Iraq, the deaths of thousands of soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians, and the current quagmire of the Sunni/Shiia religious war. As a substitute for this actual history, Dr. Bowen applauds Bush and criticizes Obama, his conclusion being that although the Bush sponsored Afghan "conflict" was "positive" in giving Afghans the "possibility" to "reclaim the future lost" in the 1979 Russian war, that future has been hindered by the "indecisiveness" and "operational failures" of Obama (his "withdrawal of U.S. forces"). In other words, the politician Bowen makes Bush the astute military strategist and Obama the inept one.

JOHN C. BIERK, Cape Girardeau